The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for creating a searchable reference database, especially for, but not limited to, music and multimedia files. In particular, it relates to retrieving stored music using a non-text-based retrieval system.
Collections of stored music, maintained in databases, have become a common feature of the commercial landscape. Finding music in such a database can pose problems, however. A distinct problem is the difficulty imposed by the search methods offered by music databases. Generally, a user must start with a text entry, either generally stated or input to a specific search field, such as “Song Name” or “Artist.” A user may not remember the exact name of the piece, however, or even the name of the artist, group, or composer. Here, not only can great confusion exist among the various incarnations of, say, Engelbert Humperdinck, but even if one can remember the name, spelling can be an issue. The universal requirement for text-based music searching makes such problems inherent in the art.
Moreover, once a start is made from text, the art has not succeeded in offering users a chance to hear the primary theme of a piece of music. Theme as used here refers to the combination of melody, rhythm and possibly lyrics, that a human listener would consider to be the main part of a piece of music. The art would find such a task difficult even if one had access to the original score and the lyrics of a piece of music. It is difficult, if not impossible, to automatically extract a theme from the score and attach it to the words from the lyrics. There have been some attempts to extract the main melody of a song from its digital format using signal processing and artificial intelligence approaches. These approaches have failed, especially in music involving multiple instruments playing simultaneously.
An opportunity thus arises to provide improved methods and systems for retrieving stored music, based on non-text-based retrieval methods.